Sign in / up

back to article US employers slash 85,000 jobs in December

Hopes that US job losses would shrink to almost four figure levels in December were dashed today when the US Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed that 85,000 employees were shed last month. While the number of jobs shed by employers in the United States was nearly an order of magnitude lower in December 2009 that it was twelve …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Jimmy Floyd
    Thumb Down

    "So?" shrugged the stock market?

    All of which has done pretty much bugger all to the markets today. Slight dip, recover, keep calm and carry on.

    If nothing else, this proves that the market rally over the past 9-months has had little connection to the real world. I predict another stock market crash, or at least a heavy correction, once this is finally accepted.

    0 0
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    If you are unemployed in the US

    form your own currency, head off to the public woods and fields with whatever you can muster, and start building a community. The US has tons of space, it is just a matter of organising enough people, and being willing to keep hold of that land once working it.

    There are quite a few communities springing up based round this approach, you don't need central or state government it is just a drain. They will be screwed soon enough without the tax money and it is no fun being a politician if you cannot pay your fine police force or military, they have access to quite effective weaponry. To the hills, just be sure to pack enough trail mix, and water.

    0 0
  3. Hungry Sean

    laid off for Christmas

    Count me as one of the 80,000 unlucky stiffs and a computer engineer/software developer. I got laid off at the start of December and applied all over the place with very few responses, all negative. It's a bad time to be out of work because: 1) there's all the holidays messing with the schedules of recruiters and hiring managers, and 2) new hires add on to the depleted yearly budget-- better to wait a month and push them onto next year's total. Since the new year, things have been looking brighter, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping I'll find something good. It's ugly out there.

    0 0
  4. Doug Glass
    Go

    Temps ARE the Trend

    Watch closely, the day of the permanent [worker bee] employee has passed. World wide, the new employment logic is now temporary employees with no benefits supplied by the company. Think this isn't correct??? Just watch and see what the corporations and smaller businesses have learned. It'll take most of this year, but it's here now and it's for real.

    0 0
  5. shawnfromnh

    seasonal

    I guess they thought the economy was so bad that there would not be seasonal layoffs from companies running skeletal crews which is aparently not the case. As in seasonal I mean landscapers and construction related. It around december when especially the construction industry in any states where there is frost or subfreezing temp usually slows down a lot putting many onto unemployment for usually around 2 months. These people usually take jobs at this time in various other fields including taking service related or factory jobs till the weather warms and their employers give them a call.

    I imagine the amount of people not getting a job during the layoff period was the surprising thing since there are not a lot of them out there to begin with and many great workers still sitting around waiting for warmer weather.

    0 0
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I believe the stock market is rising in value

    because of inflation, not because of real value added. So it looks good on the press releases, but doesn't mean diddly to the stiff looking for a job. I'm one of the lucky ones who got hired for an IT position at the beginning of January. Temp to perm on for a contracting agency, should be a perm in three months.

    At best the economy will remain stagnant for the rest of the year. Taxes are going up so industry investment will go down. Furthermore, I've been reading a bit from banking insiders the last couple of days. While the official numbers on foreclosures are holding steady, they aren't real. The US foreclosure process is a long one, and in normal times it takes about 9 months for a bank to process one. So again, in normal times they pretty much start the clock on them as soon as possible because of the lag time. But with the bottom falling out of the home market, the banks have stopped doing that. Which means that when the economy does start to pickup, they are going to either keep the foreclosure pipe where it is, or open it bigger to try to flush out their non-performing loans. Not pretty no matter how you look at it.

    0 0
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like